Monthly Archives: April 2014

It wouldn’t be completely fair to say that no American woman (AW) understands the importance of gender roles in relationship dynamics the way that Russian women (RW) seem to. But such AW seem to be so few and far between that when one ends up being quoted in print, it becomes newsworthy.

Kirsten Dunst in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar has this to say about gender roles in relationships:

I feel like the feminine has been a little undervalued. We all have to get our own jobs and make our own money, but staying at home, nurturing, being the mother, cooking – it’s a valuable thing my mum created. And sometimes, you need your knight in shining armour. I’m sorry. You need a man to be a man and a woman to be a woman. That’s why relationships work.

Hear, hear! It’s a good thing a woman with some life experience came along and said something like this. A man would have gotten himself shouted down and jeered off of the stage if he said the same thing.

The cover model on next month’s issue Harper’s Bazaar UK is none other than Kirsten Dunst, actress and blonde who looks good in clothes and has a new movie coming out soon. She has some thoughts on how women best act when they’re in relationships.

I’m not going to couch this much because Kirsten Dunst is not paid to write gender theory so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that she’s kind of dumb about it, just as I wouldn’t be surprised if Gloria Steinem sucked at convincingly and heartbreakingly playing a mysterious oversexed teen who kills herself in a Sofia Coppola movie. So, you know.

Anyway. Take it away, Dunst:

I feel like the feminine has been a little undervalued. We all have to get our own jobs and make our own money, but staying at home, nurturing, being the mother, cooking – it’s a valuable thing my mum created. And sometimes, you need your knight in shining armour. I’m sorry. You need a man to be a man and a woman to be a woman. That’s why relationships work…

That’s why relationships work. We’ve been doing it wrong all along.

A lot of ad hominem directed at Dunst to wade through in such a brief post but I wonder how an English major from the University of Notre Dame is more qualified to write about gender theory than an actress, as Ryan seems to imply? In my line of work we call this credential stretching.

Jezebel is gossip mixed with predatory journalism, half-baked with sarcasm which Ryan dishes out in abundance with hard-hitting, thought provoking journalism like “The Grossest Thing You Ever Witnessed In Public”! Seriously, there’s more content in my left nostril.

The important thing to take away from this minor tiff is that Kirsten Dunst gets it; Erin Gloria Ryan doesn’t. When it comes to men choosing which of the two women to have a relationship with, Dunst has a more attractive attitude that appeals to men. Dunst never says or even suggests that women should stop getting jobs or making their own money, but the caring and nurturing qualities are the female traits that are valued in relationships and families, and men that are interested in the same thing zero in on this.

Unfortunately, most women in America want to be like Ryan and wonder where all the good men have gone. So here’s a couple words of advice.

Embrace your feminine natures. In the relationship market it is your most valuable commodity. Women at Ryan’s age should have had these traits very well developed and practiced, but they seemed to have atrophied in today’s modern woman.

Ditch the sarcasm. Seriously. It’s not cute or attractive. Men need to use sarcasm because we are constantly being shit tested* by women we approach on the dating scene so that we can demonstrate grace under fire as we get rebuffed and be able to save some face. And the sarcasm we use needs to be light-hearted and witty enough as to not cause offense. Sarcasm for the sake of insulting somebody the way Ryan has done just makes you an ugly person. And if you think that I’m being harsh to Ryan, I’d encourage you to google about her tweets made upon news of the death of Paul Walker (of the Fast and Furious franchise)–left as an exercise for the reader.

To be sure there are some Erin Gloria Ryan’s in Russia but there are a lot more Kirsten Dunst’s.

*The shit test refers to loaded questions or remarks that women say for which there doesn’t seem to be a correct response (ie: Does this dress make me look fat? or Are you a player?). Trying to answer the question directly is failing the shit test with today’s modern women. It’s generally advised for the man to use humor and wit to redirect the conversation so that she is responding to him and not the other way around (Aren’t you too old to be asking me these questions? Or Whoa! Slow down there, Miranda! We just met each other!).